Project Planning

1
Project Planning
2
Teams

• Scheduler
• Henley, Yevgeniy, Jonghow, Mimi
• Photography Management System
• Ben, Howell, Ian, Jeff
• Used Books Marketplace
• Mikhail, Kaushik, Casey, Danny
• MMPORPG
• Chris, Stacey, Jen, Mariya, Gabe

3
Next assignment

• Requirements Document
• Due one week from today (Feb. 14)
• Details will be available on the web page tonight

4
Course Culture

• This is a real project
• We expect you to work to build a real system
• To be used by real people
• No play acting
• Take responsibility
• You are expected to find and solve problems
  yourself
• Coding is only part of the job
• Be prepared for a lot of other work
• Course staff are available for advice

5
Teams

• Teams have been assigned
• This is how it is in real projects
• We took into consideration preferences and
  experience
• Statistics on team assignments
• 11 people got their first choice, 2 second
  choice, 4 third
• Most partner requests were honored
• Balance of experience was taken into account

6
Teams Again

• Today you step into the unknown
• To have a chance of returning, your team must
  function reasonably well
• People problems trump technical issues
• Often the reason for failure

7
Potential Team Problems

• Team members have different goals
• Do a great project
• Get a good grade in the class
• Survive the class
• Differences in goals will dog every step
• Spend time discussing your goals
• And work throughout the semester to make and keep
  commitment to shared goals
• Be a team, not just a group !

8
Potential Team Problems

• Team members dont meet commitments
• Promise one thing
• Do something else
• Terrible for teams of any size
• Makes planning impossible
• Cant give the unreliable one anything
  significant
• Everyone needs to take responsibility
• But recognize also that everyone makes mistakes

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Dealing with Team Problems

• Communicate!
• Early and often, among yourselves
• Try to get together right away!
• Schedule at least weekly meetings
• Talk about goals, missed deadlines, etc.
• Do not ignore problems and hope they go away
• Set the tone early
• Be the group you want to be on the first day
• Team culture is like cement
• Sets quickly and hard to alter later

10
Project Assignments

• Documents
• Requirements and specification
• Design and initial plan
• Design review (for another project)
• Revised design and plan
• QA (for another project)
• The project itself
• The documents are on a tight schedule
• 1 or 1.5 weeks each

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Requirements and Specification

• Goals
• Flesh out project concept
• Initial idea is just a starting point
• Some of the ideas have weaknesses that can be
  fixed
• OK for project to morph from the original idea
• Find a customer!
• Every project must have an external customer
• Talk to this person/organization to gather
  requirements
• Suggestion Everyone on the team tries to find a
  customer

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Presentations (Requirements)

• 15 minutes/presentation
• Hard limit!
• Format
• 10 minute presentation
• 5 minutes QA
• Try to make your presentation useful
• It is a plus to share negative experiences,
  perhaps with solutions

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Presentation 1 Requirements 5-10 slides

• Project name and name of speaker
• What does it do?
• Brief description of what project will do
• Who are the customers?
• List of customers you have contacted
• Comments on each
• What are the requirements?
• Bulleted list, use cases
• What are the problems?
• What dont you know how to solve yet?

• HTML, PDF, or PowerPoint
• Email to barrett_at_cs by 10am on the day of
  presentations.

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Presentation 2 Design 5-10 slides

• Project name and name of speaker
• Different speaker than last time
• How has the spec. changed
• If nothing, say none
• Design
• Plan
• Implementation and testing plan
• What are the problems?
• What dont you know how to solve yet?

• HTML, PDF, or Powerpoint
• Email to barrett_at_cs by 10 a.m. on the day of the
  presentation

15
Presentations 34 Testing, Final Report

• Different speakers (so everyone gets a chance)
• More information on these coming later